I was wondering if anybody had any (preferably experience-based ) opinions about various webhost providers. The planned site will primarily be text oriented and use one of the more popular CMS solutions (i.e. Drupal or Joomla). I'm not expecting any need for huge transfer quotas for the first year or two. This puppy will be self-funded, so pricing is also a factor. I'd like to stay somewhere in the $500/yr range for out-of-pocket.

For every one recommendation there's at least one matching horror story. Anybody have any raves or caveats?

http://nethosted.co.uk/ gets a lot of recommendation and I can only agree. tickets get responses within 10-30 minutes and manages to keep that small family feel with a total professional commitment. It's in the UK and it's not the cheapest however i'm sure u'd stay under 500 dollars.

im in uk too but http://www.servage.net comes with my recommendation, £4.50 so about $9/month, its doesnt have to fastest load times (see http://nico.yottagames.net for an example), but comes with 510gb disk space and 5.01tb BW/month. it also comes with an optional auto-installer option for software like joomla.

I recently moved my site to lunarpages.com, I have had no complaints and it beat the pants off my last host as far as features to price ratio.

I pay $94 for the year with unlimited domains.. I don't have a high traffic volume so I can't speak to that, but I'm pretty happy with the service and the public forums are very friendly, helpful, and support techs get involved in the discussion.

If you don't mind storing your site over the sea...The Dutch based http://www.hosting2go.nl is a very capable provider that has managed to put up several sites from me within 24 hours (incl. domain)...for the pricey sum of 40 euro's a year. They support the Joomla CMS, unlimited email, unlimited sub-domains, PHP, MySQL...all the basic are there.

This is their cheapest offer, so expect a lot more for spending a little more money. As you might or might not know, the internet infrastructure in Holland is extremely good (enough redundancy to guarantee a lot of uptime).

I doubt you would take my option but you might. I post in a forum 5 times a week to keep points up and I get free webhosting. I bought a domain and added it to my account and I been good for a year+ as well as happy. They do occasionally have an issue but it fixed pronto.

http://www.Frihost.comDescription * 250 Mb of space for your entire collection of websites. * 10 GB of traffic each and every month. * 1 short free subdomain to be reachable in the whole world (you.frih.net). * Php and Perl scripting languages to fulfill all your programming needs. * The DirectAdmin control panel to manage your web hosting account. * No forced advertisements. Your own ads like google adsense are allowed. * Unlimited MySQL databases for all your data. * Unlimited subdomains and ftp accounts of all your domains. * Unlimited email accounts for your correspondence. * Unlimited parked and addon domains for your whole portfolio of websites. * Great community forums of over 500,000 posts and over 25,000 members to get support from.

! We only provide free php hosting to all active members of our forums. You need at least 5 quality posts before requesting a completely free web hosting account. Being active on our forums afterwards is also required in order to keep your hosting account.

I doubt you would take my option but you might. I post in a forum 5 times a week to keep points up and I get free webhosting.

You're right, it's not an option I would use. But I gave a certain impoverished "artsy type" I know a copy of your post and it made her day! Wanna guess who's up there building quality points as we speak? Righteous frugality if ever I saw it. Gotta love it! Well done

I used 1and1 because of a free offer they had a few years back. They were pretty good on the free account, but when that expired and I went to a paid account, it was too slow for any decent cms options. Their support is also problematic, and it is very hard to cancel your account and prevent them from auto-renewing and billing you.

GoDaddy also had a lot of problems when trying to use a cms that required a sql backend. After a week of dealing with support techs who insisted that everything worked on their end, and that it was a problem with my computer or isp, I finally got a manager on the phone who admitted that they were having difficulty accessing my site as well. He was unable to explain why the lower level techs lied about being able to access my site, and didn't give me any reason to stick with them for anything (even for domain registrations),.

I currently use hostgator.com and I am very pleased with the service. My sites are always accessible, they load quickly, and the tech support is average to above average. Their prices are reasonable as well.

I have 1X and it is excellent for the price. Speed is very good and you get lots of databases (both SQL Server and MySQL). Main problem is downtime which is significant (since Jan, approx 4-8 hrs per week)

This isn't completely relevant, but let me take this opportunity to mention that Gothi[c] and I have finally bit the bullet and upgraded the Donationcoder (secondary) member server from a $60/month virtual private server, to a $150/month dedicated server. That's not quite in the same league as our main server, but a huge improvement from the current server we use to host member accounts and miscellaneous stuff.

This new member server is significantly beyond our current needs. The hope is that (assuming we can afford it), it will let us be much more generous about providing server space and functionality to donationcoder members and projects. Once it's all set up I'd encourage people to try to come up with proposals for projects.

This new member server is significantly beyond our current needs. The hope is that (assuming we can afford it), it will let us be much more generous about providing server space and functionality to donationcoder members and projects. Once it's all set up I'd encourage people to try to come up with proposals for projects.

Sounds awesome mouse man Until then, I'm a second for DreamHost. They have a bit of a reputation for being a bit unprofessional, but they certainly know what they're doing, and they do it very well.

im in uk too but http://www.servage.net comes with my recommendation, £4.50 so about $9/month, its doesnt have to fastest load times (see http://nico.yottagames.net for an example), but comes with 510gb disk space and 5.01tb BW/month. it also comes with an optional auto-installer option for software like joomla.

Few problems with servage is there Clustered Servers setup doesn't like install scripts as installing SMF(there autoinstall script says SMF1.1.2) & then any mods will give errors as the server takes ownership of folders/files after a test which make it a pain to work with last install I did was on a WampServer on my computer to make sure it was good & them uploaded the SMF folder & database & changed the config & anything in the database to the path on server.

That seems to be the problem with most of the PHP/MySQL package autoinstallers bundled into server packages (including those bundled CPanel). You inevitably get an out of date version (so the latest security updates aren't implemented) and because you didn't control the installation updates often don't work properly. My experience with CPanel was that it built MySQL databases and you needed to be a detective to find the database password generated by the system before you could even delete it again!

LayeredTech --- AVOID!!! Incompetent beyond human comprehension. They managed to lose all data from RAID 1 mirrored drives on me! You cannot possibly screw up worse than that. That's on top of 2 weeks of downtime that was entirely their fault. Serious moron working there. (It only gets worse.)

The Planet --- Excellent. I have zero downtime and have had no problems with them. Very good and recommended.

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

I can tell you from personal experience with different hosting accounts that I'd rather shoot myself in the face than ever use a hosted account ever again.

The difference between $500 and $1,000 isn't that big once you figure in the massive costs of the downtime and truckloads of Tylenol that you'll need to deal with the BS of a shared server.

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

It would be a bit of a stretch (almost a car payment to be exact ) but from what I'm hearing in other places, a dedicated server is definitely something I'll have to consider. Thanks for bringing it up.

I used 1and1 because of a free offer they had a few years back. They were pretty good on the free account, but when that expired and I went to a paid account, it was too slow for any decent cms options. Their support is also problematic, and it is very hard to cancel your account and prevent them from auto-renewing and billing you.

Yeah. Been there with 1&1 a few years back so I feel your pain. Mega-hassles. That's one of the reasons why I came here to get input.

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

It would be a bit of a stretch (almost a car payment to be exact ) but from what I'm hearing in other places, a dedicated server is definitely something I'll have to consider. Thanks for bringing it up.

Think about it this way...

How much is your time worth? Do you want the pain and hassles of dealing with support staff that are total morons and should probably have been flunked out of kindergarten?

How much is downtime worth? How much will it cost to get things up again?

Can you afford for some other jerk on a server to hog all the resources with a crappy script?

On my own personal server I have had ZERO downtime because I control everything and make sure things work. (OS reboots excepted... )

But you can still get dedicated Linux servers for under $50 a month (I can't speak to the reliability there). But there are cheap ones out there. There are lots available for $80~90 a month too that will do a fantastic job.

However, you need to administer them yourself for best results.

Years ago I used only dedicated servers and had no problems. Then for some smaller sites I went with hosting... I very soon learned that hosting doesn't work for sites that grow.